v-stok

[v-stok]

It was a pleasure having a conversation with ClotMag about my album Liminal and the process and inspirations behind it. The article is available here and I have also pasted it below.

“The next mixtape arrives from V-Stók, aka Valentin Doychinov, an electronic musician, guitarist, producer and film score composer. With an interest in nature, mathematics and of course music, he finds inspiration in a diverse set of influences that range from the fringes of experimental club music, noise, and ambient to instrumental genres such as jazz fusion and post-rock.

V-Stók has released several EPs and albums for several experimental labels, and he has just published a new LP, Liminal (Position Disposition, 2022) where he combines his recent jazz fusion influences with the noise, ambient and broken electronics sound he developed during the last LPs.

Incepted during pandemics, the album title Liminal refers to a state of ‘occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold’ and very trivially, the spark of inspiration came from a Facebook group called ‘Liminal Spaces’ which I came across at some point over the lockdown period. In this group people generally post pictures of cities and buildings when they are devoid of people – these both convey a certain emotion that combines a sense of loneliness, isolation and also otherworldliness which I was also feeling during this year, but I didn’t know how to express.

The artist also shares that the way the tracks were made is also a result of a very improvisational approach both with the synth and other production gear he was using; the tracks were recorded live and improvisations were layered on top of each other. I also experimented with techniques for creating very broken and unpredictable beats.

Valentin’s daytime profession as a wind energy project engineer allows him to contribute to another cause that is massively important to him – the decarbonisation and transition to clean energy sources for society.

For our mix, he’s prepared a selection of tracks from albums he has been enjoying lately; mostly made of atmospheric tracks that have a certain ambience that communicates well with his approaches to production.

What was the creative process like for the production of your last album, liminal: What were you technically and conceptually (if so) exploring with it? and also how related to the pandemics isolation you went through during the production

My creative process was very much focused on recording very long improvisations with my various bits of gear and selecting the parts that I thought made sense as tracks and overdubbing them, creating arrangements out of it. Conceptually I have been playing around a lot with ideas about randomness and stretching of time – it is something that continues to fascinate me. For me, this field of experimental electronic music is a very fertile field of intermeshing scientific ideas and artistic metaphors. So there are for example beats in the album that are a result of a fairly straightforward beat being subjected to various clock modulations which end up completely disjointing the original beat into something very alien. Additionally, I deliberately experimented with making experimental electronic music peppered with jazz influences. There are very interesting intersection points when you take some really wild and unpredictable electronic patch and try to improvise in a sort of fusion jazz paradigm where everything is possible in a way without worrying too much about things being right or wrong harmonically as long as the rhythmic phrasing is more or less convincing.

What are your main inspirations for your productions these days? Has it changed after pandemics?

I get inspired a lot by nature, mathematics and of course by listening to music and reading about music. It’s all about finding the poetry in these fields and how they communicate with each other. Also in my listening habits, I have drifted primarily into jazz, folk and classical music. Liminal turned out to be much more melodic and ‘musical’ for such reasons. I also came back to my guitar playing more properly. It tends to be very improvisation driven.

The album touches on different aspects of liminality and how this is experienced, what would be the main reflection about it after producing liminal? Did it make you reflect as well about the boundaries of the physical and digital’

There are many aspects of liminality I guess when it comes to this music. On one hand, it is very transitory genre-wise I think and is not committing to any particular genre strain. And as alluded to in the previous question, I did this on purpose – like for example in the track ‘A pocket within a pocket’ I started with this scary noise beat and I thought ‘Uhm that sounds cool but it’s a bit one dimensional so I decided it would be funny to play some funky wah wah guitars on top almost like some Fun Lovin Criminals vibe that I used to listen ages ago. So this track kind of became this liminal animal of incongruency that I thought was really fun.

Also when it comes to the mood I did much of the work in the first lockdowns when the Covid situation was unfolding and we were reading on the news daily how the cases and casualties were increasing and that affected me as anyone else very very much.

There is indeed a bit of narrative around the blurring of borders between digital and physical life. It is a topic that I spend a fair amount of time thinking about. Our lives, especially in western urban environments, are already lived at least 50/50 in digital worlds and it looks like this is only going to increase. I, like many people in my generation, am very suspicious of various implications such as big tech trying to plug their ad serving platforms directly into our brains. So for the time being I think I have a wait and see attitude towards virtual reality etc.

Where would you like to take your V-Stók project into?

I have just moved to Genoa in Italy and the move has been occupying me the last few months. I now have a good place set up to record. I have some new material that I am working on and aiming to complete another release probably towards the end of the year.

What is your relationship with novel technologies nowadays, and how do you use them for your practice? And how do you cope with technology (screen/digital) overload?

I use a lot of gear but I wouldn’t call any of it really ‘novel’ as it’s gear that’s existed at least for 10 years. The same goes for the software I use – it is mostly Ableton and a bunch of other plugins such as compressors and so on. Nothing that I would consider cutting edge. It is on my to-do list to get a bit more into multi-channel recording and composition. I started exploring this a bit when I was part of the Amas crew in London and it’s definitely something that interests me.

On the visual side, I have been learning about tools such as TouchDesigner and Houdini and have used those for my videos and cover art for the CDs.

Regarding screen overload, yes, it can be a bit of an issue. It is a long topic. My strategy is to actively manage my feed so it’s fairly boring and is not drawing me into various rabbit holes. I used to follow a lot of very hard left pages and wasted a fair amount of time on those with no specific benefit to me or to the world around me so I got rid of all of them.”

[v-stok]

I created a mix for Ma3azef which is archived for listening here.

Tacklist:

Magda Mayas & Tina Douglas - Point 1

MUDDY - Golden Postulate

V-Stók – Unsafe Harbour

Valance Drakes - Weak Humans, Wise Demons (Anthony Baldino Remix)

Rhonchus - بلَووِه - 02 دآ

Rick Vayo – Restless

XI-N – Enoxolone

IllSantoBevitore – A Spell On You

Evitceles – Transfixxed

I.G. – SCHOCKSTARRE

V-Stók – Caravan

MUDDY – Golden Shadow

Shentov, Simitchiev, Lukanov - Waiting Line

[v-stok]

It was a pleasure to speak to Son Of Marketing on some tracks that have inspuired my latest album Liminal

My AweSOMe Guest List: V-Stók

"Bristol based experimental producer and composer V-Stók has announced the release of a new album called Liminal which will be out on January 28th via Position Disposition. According to the press release,it combines his recent jazz fusion influences with the noise, ambient and broken electronics sound he developed during his last LPs. As such Liminal is a genre bending midpoint between influences such the abstract melancholy of guitarists such as Bill Frisell, Jakob Bro, Loren Connors the fusion improvisations of the late Miles Davis, and the rhythmic noise palette from Mika Vainio, Autechre-esque beat destruction and creepy cellar electronics of Coil, Nurse with wound etc.

Listen to the first excerpt “Caravan” and check this awesome list with 7 artists and tracks which have inspired his music.

“The process of being influenced is something that I find quite fascinating. You hear a track and you go ‘wooww I never thought that was allowed in music’. Or sometimes a simple melody would invoke a certain emotion or a memory or a vision of certain environment. Then these impressions will seep into your process without being intended. I like being influenced. When I was young and stubborn I was trying really hard to avoid it and would bin pieces that I thought ended up resembling my favourite artists. These days I am quite happy to be influenced by anything, I just let music happen. I read an interesting quote by Dylan Carlson from Earth that music is like water and the musician is like the vessel that defines the shape of the water, which is exactly how I feel about it. Here are a few tracks that I think have left an impression and I think have played a role in my work for my latest album Liminal.”

Mika Vainio – Load. The minimalist rhythmic noise / industrial sound of Mika Vainio has definitely been very important in my appreciation of electronic music. On one hand on technical / sound design level but also on emotional level the way I perceive this music is to be intense and enveloping but also ‘undramatic’ and that is kind of how I am trying to get at in one way or another in my music.

Saba Alizadeh – Scattered Memories. The whole album Scattered Memories was on constant rotation when it came out and I still come back to it fairly often. For me the fusion of Persian motives and electronic elements has been very inspiring. I guess listening music like this lately sort of put me in a mindset that it is okay to delve a bit into eastern inspired improvisation as it went for ‘Caravan’ in the album. As many electronic musicians who are native to this folklore music I also need a bit of easing into this territory as mixture of electronic sounds and folklore music tends to gel the wrong way. In that sense, listening to Saba’s album has kind of tuned my brain into what possibilities there are to blend the electronica with some folklore inspired motives..

Jakob Bro – Housework. This work of Jakob Bro sits in between minimalist Nordic melancholia and what I would call for lack of better words, abstract jazz with the sparse drumming Jorge Rossy that provides a percussive tapestry rather a rhythmic backbone to the rest of the instrumentation. This approach to improvisation with very minimal means has definitely left a lasting effect in my process and approach to guitar playing and improvisation.

Bill Orcutt – The World Without me. There is a bit of a funny and maybe slightly embarrassing story around my discovery of Bill Orcutt. I saw an ad or feature for the Bill Orcutt album somewhere in the digital realm and found maybe a bancamp page. I was immediately struck by Bill’s manner of playing – this forceful, percussive blues style is something that I was exploring myself. It is also very free and improvisational in a way that there is some loose idea of what each track represents but the journey was very freewheeling. This for me was very inspiring that someone has made a record in such a way – in my upbringing of growing up in bands environment and more or less classical mindset you always had to play riffs, chord changes and, you know, songs where this repeats 8 times the other thing repeats 4 times, there is a break here etc -everything being very rigidly orchestrated. So Bill’s way with things was like ‘oh wow, I’m actually allowed to do that’. Unfortunately, while I heard the album or most of it, I was about to go on a trip somewhere and I could not save the music and after being for a couple of days on the go I completely forgot the name of the artist or the record. I would then do all sort of possible google searches (I somehow was convinced this music is from the 70s) without any result and I kind of gave up. I only had a vague memory of the album cover of this older man with big silver beard having a slightly grumpy look at you. But the impression on the actual approach was already deeply planted in my mind. Years later, I’d say around 2019, while browsing through Spotify I saw the section ‘you may like this’ and lo and behold here is the picture of the grumpy man I lost a few years back. So there it is, one good story on the Spotify account (there aren’t so many lately, indeed).

Autechre – curvcaten. I can’t remember exactly which one of the hundreds of Autechre tracks I heard that had a really broken and glitched out beat and a feeling as if the tempo is made to wobble and get this impression like the track is kind of stumbling and about to collapse. However, it was certainly an autechre track that made me have another aha moment. Later I kind of felt as I was making the album that this approach has interesting touch points to the free improvisation of Jakob Bro or Bill Orcutt. Again, it all kind of happened I had no precise plan to do exactly this but the pieces started to fall together as I was jamming and experimenting.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – Stunts. One thing that gets a bit heavy with Autechre for me is the generally gloomy and dystopian mood I pick up from it, so for a while I was missing a piece that was electronica that is very ethereal and childlike and just kind of looking at the world through happy and dreamy eyes. So that is when I discovered Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s music which has this mood that cover this side of the story.

Miles Davis – So What. I listen to a lot of music and it all tends to be on the obscure/nerdy end of things so I was having a think if there is any influential record for me that is one of those critically acclaimed classics that are on top of lists and is written in encyclopaedias about. And of course there is! I am really in love with Kind of Blue. I play it constantly for various occasions while having dinner, while doing something that requires concentration and of course just to listen to it and marvel at the exquisite musicianship of Miles, Trane, Bill Evans and Adderley. I am not sure how much it has had a direct influence on the album as such but this record has definitely improved my life in more than one way. And of course I love Bitches Brew, In A Silent Way and Big Fun and the rest of it that relates to Miles’ experimental records. But I also happen to be also one of these less cool ‘Kind of Blue’ lovers 😉

[v-stok]

Igloo Mag reviews my album 'Liminal'

"There are albums that pass through Igloo’s door that follow familiar sonic trajectories we’ve heard before, then there are albums that slowly emerge from the depths, unknowingly, and with their own unique production and audio-visual dynamics. Valentin Doychinov’s V-Stók moniker is one we’re familiar with and Liminal falls into the latter category. A whole other beast in itself—subtle dub extracts, instrumental tangents, and glitchy transmitted noises are more disjointed and surreal this time around.

Off-center rhythms are surrounded by ghostly guitar plucks and atmospheric strands, carefully tethered by vintage machines working diligently in the background. “Walz with Ghosts” and “Caravan” aptly depict Liminal‘s sonic wonder while thin melodies drift in the margins. As skeletons of The Future Sound of London are exhumed, V-Stók finds comfort in the uncomfortable. Tracks like “Subterranean” slither about with jazzier, almost improvised pulsars as does “A pocket within a pocket” and its lively Squarepusher fee.

The merge of crumpled electronics is placed many miles beneath V-Stók’s ability to juggle darker moods with a flare for shuffling instrumentation (ref. “Microcosmos”). The title track, a piece that stands alone, reaches the summit with calming static pulses and crunchy pseudo-beatwork—meandering through cavernous voids we’re compelled to walk through with our eyes closed."

[v-stok]

Great to see my album 'Liminal' reviewed by The Wire!

[v-stok]

My new video 'Microcosmos'

[v-stok]

The Red Velvet Revolution OST is now up on my Bandcamp

https://v-stok.bandcamp.com/album/red-velvet-revolution-ost

[v-stok]

Really glad to share that I got the Best Original Music Score award at Sicily Web Fest for my work on Red Velvet Revolution soundtrack

[v-stok]

My album Primordial Soup is now available on my Bandcamp.

The album was originally released on Amek in 2019

[v-stok]

You can listen / buy tape of my album Aquatic Rituals now on my Bandcamp page.

The album was originally released on Amek Collective

[v-stok]

Full recording of my Aquatic Rituals live set streamed from home instead of the album premiere show that was cancelled due to Covid-19

[v-stok]

My music for Red Velvet Revolution received a nomination at the Seoul Web Festival.

https://www.seoulwebfest.com/2020-nominations.html

[v-stok]

Video for my track Windy Beach, part of my album Aquatic Rituals released by Amek Collective

Music and footage by moi, editing by  Silvana Ilieva

[v-stok]

Vital Weekly reviews Aquatic Rituals

Read here: http://www.vitalweekly.net/1223.html

[v-stok]

Playing at Life is Live event today at Studio EW in Sofia, presenting material from my new album Aquatic Rituals, out on Amek

https://www.facebook.com/events/204301303986966/

[v-stok]

Igloo Mag reviews my new album Aquatic Rituals.

Read here: https://igloomag.com/reviews/in-rotation-multi-view-feb-2020-2

[v-stok]

My new album is out on Amek Collective on tape and digital.

Get tape: https://amekcollective.bandcamp.com/album/aquatic-rituals

Add to streaming app: https://ampl.ink/QoxrA

Cover design by: Bogomi (https://www.facebook.com/bogomi.creative)